Friday, October 28, 2016

Mapping Trump's Wall

If Donald Trump becomes president he plans to stop Americans escaping to the free world by building a massive wall along the border of Mexico. More than 650 miles of the 1,954 mile long U.S.-Mexico border is already fenced. This means that the 'Welcome to Trumpland' Wall will need to be at least 1,300 miles long. That's a lot of Chinese steel.

You can get a good sense of the scale of construction needed to build Trump's wall in a new video from the Intercept. The Intercept downloaded and stitched together 200,000 satellite images to create a huge strip map of the U.S.-Mexican border. You can view this strip map in Visualizing the U.S.-Mexico Border, a short video which pans along the whole border.

An interactive map of Trump's proposed wall also exists. Doug McCune has used Mapbox GL to create a 3d map of Trump's wall. The wall is colored in a patriotic red, white and blue. However the scale of the wall is probably a little out (it appears to be at least 10 miles high on Doug's map).